The Fujimori Verdict: Justice in Latin America

The Fujimori Verdict: Justice in Latin
America

“With this ruling,
and its exemplary performance during the trial, the Peruvian
court has shown the world that even former heads of state
cannot expect to get away with serious
crimes.”Maria McFarland, Human Rights Watch, April
8, 2009.

In a region of the world where
state brutality has been the depressing norm, the conviction
of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori on grave human
rights charges seems something akin to a miracle. Usually,
cases of brutality have been papered over by the granting of
amnesties, ostensibly to allow countries to reconcile
contesting and bitter factions. This decision challenges
that approach, setting a chilling precedent to leaders who
might argue that such an outcome is best reserved for
dictators and despots. Fujimori was, after all,
democratically elected.

The Peruvian leader, elected in
1990, had promoted himself as strongman and protector of the
state during that turbulent decade, overwhelming the
insurgent challenge posed by the guerillas of the Maoist
Shining Path. But that came with its share of blood and
carnage. Faced with a mountain of corruption charges, he
submitted his resignation, somewhat unusually, by fax,
promptly fleeing to the country of his parent’s birth,
Japan, in 2000. Feeling the wanderlust of a political
return, he traveled to Chile, only to find himself facing an
extradition order in 2007.

The three judges who tried
Fujimori found him guilty of an assortment of “crimes
against humanity” after a fifteen-month trial, imposing a
25-year prison sentence. Amongst the charges were military
operations that left 15 people dead on November 3, 1991,
including the death of an eight-year old boy in the Barrios
Altos neighbourhood in Lima; the kidnapping, disappearance
and murder of a group of students along with a professor
from La Cantuta University on July 18, 1992; and the murder
of 25 others. These had been perpetrated by a military
death squad belonging to the Army Intelligence Service
headed by Fujimori’s close advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos.

Fujimori has had little interest in the charges, or for
the process that brought him there in the first place. And
little wonder. Students of the region will remember his
efforts to immunize the police and armed forces from charges
of human rights violations with a blanket amnesty in 1995.
His amnesty laws were subsequently struck down by the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which found them
obnoxious to notions of justice.

From Fujimori’s
perspective, evidence linking him to the events in question
is lacking. The links simply did not exist. “As I said
in the beginning,” he had told the court, “I’m
innocent.” The murders and kidnappings were simply the
enterprising moves of free spirited anti-communist
operatives connected with the security forces, known as the
Grupo Colina or Colina Group.

This, it would seem, was far
from the case. Reports have circulated since 2005, most
notably a Human Rights Watch document, Probable Cause:
Evidence Implicating Fujimori, showing strong links
between Fujimori and the brutalities of the Colina group.
Abundant testimony and documentation suggests that the group
figured prominently in military operations. The army and
National Intelligence Service, both under Fujimori’s
control, supplied them with plentiful resources and
logistical support. Even the US Embassy in Lima had to
concede that the Fujimori regime had been engaged in a
“covert strategy to aggressively fight against subversion
through terror operations, disregarding human rights and
legal norms.”

Whatever the international repercussions
of the decision, its effectiveness will have to be gauged
within Peruvian circles. Hugo Relva, legal advisor for
Amnesty International, lauded it as a blow to those who
still believed in impunity. Efrain Gonzales, vice rector of
the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima,
suggested the healing propensities of the verdict. In this
sense, the argument is very conventional: punishment through
regular tribunals in a manner just for both the person
charged and the society he is said to have harmed. In
Gonzales’s words, quoted in the Christian Science
Monitor, “It’s an acceptance that we had a problem.
He is guilty… The nation can move forward from
here.”

A considerable minority of Peruvians who continue
supporting the convicted leader may not be convinced. The
matter has become something of a family affair, with
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko, describing the verdict as one
filled with “hate and vengeance.” The precedent against
impunity in Latin America has, however, been set, whatever
the aspirations of the Fujimorists and their
supporters.

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